Enlarge ImageRequest to buy this photoBEN MARGOT | ASSOCIATED PRESSJimmy Walker won the first event of the season in October and had two other high finishes early, which boosted him into the top spot in the FedEx Cup points standings, a position he still holds.

When Dan Sullivan saw a list of the top 20 golfers in the FedEx Cup points standings recently, he was struck by the number of names who might be unfamiliar to the casual golf fan.

Jimmy Walker. Patrick Reed. Harris English. Chris Kirk. Matt Every.

“That has a little bit to do with the early start,” said Sullivan, director of the Memorial Tournament. “Some guys got out ahead and had some wins — Jimmy Walker being one of them — so the more prominent names in the game aren’t necessarily in the top 10 or 20 because their seasons haven’t necessarily gotten into full swing yet.”

This year, though, the PGA Tour season has made the turn and is well into the back nine as it heads into June this weekend. Nearly eight months have passed since the tour’s first “wrap-around” season began in October — four days after the Presidents Cup matches ended at Muirfield Village Golf Club.

“When you think of the Memorial, it’s like you’re thinking you still had a lot of the season left. But it’s winding down now,” tour pro Mark Wilson said.

“So for a player who maybe hasn’t had a great year, who says, ‘Well, I can play the fall events and make enough money to keep my card,’ no. The Memorial is near the end (now). The majors are winding up. The FedEx Cup playoffs are right around the corner.”

The handful of fall tournaments historically overlooked by fans and the tour’s elite players, who go overseas for big-money guarantees if they play at all, gained some traction with the rank-and-file last year when the new schedule made its fall debut. For the first time, what had been second-tier events awarded points in the race for the FedEx Cup playoffs, as well as a spot in the Masters, to the winners. Fields were “stronger across the board,” said Andy Pazder, the PGA Tour’s chief of operations.

Jack Nicklaus called the tour’s idea to extend its lineup of meaningful competition another two months “brilliant.”

“I didn’t know with the FedEx Cup whether they’d ever get where they wanted to get, but I think they did. They got the guys to play into October” when the Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup matches are added on, Nicklaus said.

“Now they start right back over again, and all of a sudden you’re saying, ‘Hey, I need to get a start on the season. I don’t want to be starting three months behind everybody else.’ So a lot of the guys — not all of them, but some of the guys — are going to play more because they get that head start on the season.”

Walker has been the biggest beneficiary of that approach this season. While many players who had gone hard through August and September chilled for a bit, Walker won the first event out of the chute, the Frys.com Open in San Martin, Calif., on Oct. 13. It was his first career win in 188 tour events dating to 2001.

Then he finished 12th the next week and sixth in the third event, and he went into the new year leading the tour in earnings and FedEx points. Five months later, he still is No. 1, having won again in Hawaii in January and Pebble Beach a month later. He has played 18 tournaments, a half-dozen or more than three of his closest pursuers, Bubba Watson, Matt Kuchar and Dustin Johnson. He is taking this week off after playing in the past four events.

At the other end of the spectrum, though, are the 50 players who qualified for the tour out of the Web.com Tour Finals last year. There wasn’t as much room as expected for them in the pared-down, 132-player fields in the four domestic events (three in the United States, one in Mexico). Fewer than 34 players, on average, got spots in each field, and seven did not play in any of the four events, as tour veterans with higher priority took them.

Pazder offered two theories for that:

“One is that players were uncertain about what sort of impact this wrap-around schedule would have,” he said, “and in its first year, maybe there were a significant number of them who said, ‘ You know what? I better make sure I’m careful here. I don’t want to wake up in June or July and realize I’m way down on the FedEx Cup points list and I’ve got a lot of ground to make up and not many weeks left to do it. So I’m going to go ahead and play a lot of the October-November tournaments because I’m not going to get a chance to make those up.’ I think that has had a bit of an impact.”

Then, too, Pazder added, the average age of the tour’s roster of 125 exempt players has grown three years younger the past few years, and “the younger and more durable a player is, the higher the probability he is going to play more.”

The tour has addressed the access issue by adding a fifth domestic tournament to the 2014-15 fall schedule, in Jackson, Miss., and increasing the size of the fields in two other tournaments by 12 players, to 144.

In doing so, it will risk not having enough daylight to complete the first two rounds of the two events. “But we’re willing to take that risk,” Pazder said. “We think those three moves will provide for greater access.”